Templates in Drum
Drum uses a templating system for opportunities, projects, deliverables and proposals and you can create and combine these different templates to manage many different project types within your business.
Each template type has it's own use case, which we'll discuss below.
At a high level, here's how the templates work in Drum:
Project and opportunity templates are made up of building blocks called "deliverables". These define the stages and tasks that should be part of any project or opportunity template and allow you to create consistent workflows.
A proposal template is made up of two key concepts, the internal budget (which can reference a project template) and the customer-facing line items.
When using Drum day-to-day, templates give you quick starting points that you can further customise for each opportunity or project as required.
Understanding Deliverable Templates - the building blocks of project and opportunity templates
A deliverable in Drum is a grouping of tasks, usually determined by a key outcome.
As an example, an "Initial Administration" deliverable may have tasks of:
Ensure documentation has been received from client
Assign key staff to project
Create job folder in Sharepoint
A deliverable template is a small piece of work that can potentially be allocated to a project OR an opportunity template as a "building block"
A deliverable ("Admin Finalisation") with 4 tasks within, shown above within a live project context.
A project for a consulting structural engineer may be made up of the following deliverables, each with their own tasks within:
Initial administration
Geotechnical investigation
Structural design
Preliminary engineering
And so on...
You can create your own deliverable templates (and the associated tasks within) to build out your required opportunity and project templates.
Creating Deliverable Templates
To create a deliverable template, you can navigate to the Drum settings and then select "Deliverable Templates" in the left-hand navigation, within the "Templates" group.
The Deliverable Templates page will show you the existing deliverable templates that you have in your account (these may simply be the default ones that are populated with each new Drum account).
What deliverables should you create in your Drum account?
There are a number of great use-cases for deliverable templates, but it's important to know that they're only used within the context of an opportunity or project template.
Deliverable templates will be the building block of your project structures!
With this in mind, great use-cases for deliverables could be:
Repeatable concept that you could apply to multiple project or opportunity types. e.g. "Initial Admin" or "Project Closing" for projects or "Tender application" or "Resource availability check" for opportunities.
Genuine "deliverables" for your client engagements, e.g. "Final Designs", "Concept Designs", "Strategy Documentation", "Final Documentation".
Think about your internal process and the steps that are required to achieve a consistent, high quality outcome each and every time.
Remember, a deliveable can be either an internal concept or a clear part of the client engagement, and the tasks that you create within can be a mixture of both as well.
Create a new deliverable template by clicking on the "Create a Deliverable Template" button to the top-right of this page.
In the window that appears, give the deliverable template a name that describes the block of work, e.g:
Preliminary structural engineering
Site investigation
Strategy research
Client discovery
Once you're happy with the name (and optionally, the description), click on the "Create Deliverable Template" button to start adding your required tasks.
A deliverable template with four tasks within. You can set this up however you like!
Now that you have a brand new deliverable template, it's time to add more context with tasks. Click on the "Add Task" button to the bottom left of the screen, under the "Deliverable Tasks" area.
Enter a name and a task type, and optionally an internal "process" or description that you'd like staff to know about when implementing this task in an actual project or opportunity (optional).
What are task types?
Drum allows you to create tasks of three different types, a "Task", an "Event" or a "Process Only" task. Here's how they differ:
A "Task" type can have an associated budget and allows time or expense allocation within a project.
An "Event" type is the same as above, but also allows allocation to staff on the Drum calendar.
A "Process Only" type is for internal, quality control use only and cannot have a budget assigned. These are great for checklist items that must be completed within a project, but don't need budget tracking.
Combining these different task types within a project gives you a lot of flexibility with how you can manage your work internally.
If in doubt, stick to "Task" and "Process Only" types for the time-being!
Add as many tasks as you'd like for your deliverable and re-order as required.
Once you're happy with your deliverable template, you can click the "Save Deliverable Template" button and go ahead and create another deliverable template to continue to create your project or opportunity "building blocks".
Opportunity Templates
Your opportunities in Drum may be a combination of project enquiries from clients, potential deals, tender submissions or simply used to track relationships over time.
To ensure a consistent process for these different use-cases you can create opportunity templates for each.
What is an opportunity template?
An opportunity template is a combination of:
A name to clearly explain it's use-case
A status (draft or active)
An assortment of deliverable templates added in order that you want to see them on your 'live' opportunities.
This is where the deliverable templates that you created above come into play.
If you haven't already, add at least one deliverable template (or edit one of the existing deliverable templates) to suit one of your "opportunity" requirements (likely around information gathering, quoting, sending the quote etc).
View your opportunity templates by clicking on the "Opportunity Templates" option in the left-hand menu of your Drum settings (within the "Templates" group).
This will list any opportunity templates that you currently have. Either edit an existing template or click on "Add an Opportunity Template" to create a new template.
If you create a new template, give it a name and then click on the "Create Template" button.
Once created, you'll see the opportunity template form that allows you to:
Change the name and status
Add or re-order any deliverable templates that should make up this proposal template.
Add custom fields (if required)
To add a new deliverable template to an opportunity template, simply click on the "Add Deliverable" button and in the window that appears, select the deliverable that you'd like to add to this opportunity template and click on "Add Deliverable to Template".
Add as many deliverables to your opportunity template as you'd like, and re-order them as required for your ideal internal process.
To ensure that your opportunity is available when creating new opportunities in Drum, ensure that the status is set to "Active" and click on the "Save Opportunity Template" button.
Now, whenever a team member manually create an opportunity in Drum, they will be able to choose your opportunity template and the appropriate deliverables and associated tasks will automatically be populated!
If you're creating opportunities in Drum using the sales inbox, be sure to mention what template you'd like to use when forwarding emails to Drum, otherwise Drum will try to choose the best option based on the email's contents.
Project Templates
Creating and managing project templates is EXACTLY the same as managing opportunity templates as documented above, but rather than navigating to the "Opportunity Templates" option in the account navbar, you should instead navigate to the "Project Templates" option.
Try creating a project template that matches one of your common internal project types by creating deliverable templates as the building blocks (the first part of this article) and then allocating them in order to a new project template.
When "active", you'll be able to choose which project template to use for new projects created manually from the project dashboard.
You can also use active project templates to structure your "project budget" for proposal templates, which we'll cover now.
Proposal Templates
An opportunity in Drum can optionally have one or more proposals where you can price the potential project and generate a dynamic Word document to send to the potential client.
A proposal is made up of two key parts:
The underlying internal "project budget" that can be adjusted on a case-by-case basis and:
The customer facing proposal sections and line items that would ideally match the same total price as what you've budgeted.
The process is usually:
We price the project by adjusting the inclusions and prices in the proposal budget.
We then adjust the line items that the client would see via the proposal itself.
By creating proposal templates, you can save significant time by having both budgets and customer-facing line items that only require minor adjustments on a case by case basis.
Depending on your business, you may need to create a handful of proposal templates to meet your quoting needs.
If your project structures differ significantly from project to project, a very basic proposal template as a starting point is usually a good idea and you can add on requirements on a case-by-case basis as required.
To create a proposal template, first select the "Proposal Templates" navigation option within the "Templates" group.
You'll then see any proposal templates that you already have in your Drum account.
Either click on the "New Proposal Template" buttton or click on an existing proposal template to start editing.
The example above shows the proposal template screen where you can see the client-facing line items and some key details in the left hand column.
This example doesn't have an associated budget, so we can create one by clicking on the "Create Associated Budget" button.
A proposal that already has an associated project budget will have a "Budget" tab that will appear above the "Proposal Pricing" heading text.
It's generally a good idea to first edit the backing budget of a proposal and then reflect those base prices in the line items. Click on the "Project Budget" tab to view the budget view.
A proposal budget is usually just a project template where you can start budgeting out the tasks, but you can further adjust the base project template with additional (or fewer) deliverables and tasks as required for each proposal template.
To fundamentally change the structure of a proposal budget, click on the "Change Structure" link below the "Project Budget Structure" heading and choose one of your project templates as a starting point.
Within each deliverable, you can now adjust the durations and rates for tasks to build out a good starting point for whenever someone uses this template in the future.
Once you're happy with the internal pricing of your proposal template, click on the "Proposal" tab to return to the client-facing line items.
On the client-facing proposal, Drum may inform you that your "internal budgeted price" no longer matches what you're displaying to the client
In this case, you can either:
Manually adjust your line items to ensure no difference.
Click the "Sync Budget" option to bring across your budget information to the proposal line items.
If you choose the second option, it will overwrite your current line items, but can be helpful when your client-facing proposal structure needs to closely match your internal budgeting.
You've now created your proposal budget which you can now use when creating proposals within your Drum opportunities!
Templates are value-levers
Once you understand how to effectively leverage templates in Drum, you'll be able to save your team significant amounts of data entry work that they would otherwise be spending on setting up each and every project or opportunity or proposal.
By creating templates that match your internal processes or client deliverables, you create a structure that you can leverage over and over again.